IN OLDEN times, when the master had to furnish the clothing for all the servants on his place, the womenfolk must have had their hands full of work the year round. Through the long, dark winter mornings and the long, dark winter evenings, they sat at the spinning wheels drawing out the threads for warp and weft. But the weaving itself was not begun until the spring, when the days grew longer; for such work cannot be done in semi-darkness.
In order to get the coarse wadmal and fine woollen cloth, the linen and cotton webs finished by summer, when the parish tailor came, they had to put speed into the looms. But if a loom stood in the kitchen the work did not go very fast. The weavers should have a place to themselves, where they can work without interruptions. Therefore, in former days every well-conducted farmstead had its special loom-room, and, of course, Mårbacka had one also. This was from the time of the clergymen. They had added a story to the manservants’ cottage consisting of two rooms, with clay-coated walls and boarded ceilings; and in each was a tile-stove. The back room was occupied by the farm overseer; and in the front room stood two looms, one at either window.
The loom-room was in use even in Lieutenant Lagerlöf’s time, though it was then no longer the custom to pay one’s serving-folk their earnings in clothing but in money. It was Fru Lagerlöf’s great delight to sit at a loom weaving towelling, bed linen, table linen, floor mats, curtains, furniture coverings, and dress fabrics—in fact, everything of that sort needed in the home. All summer long she had her looms going.
In the autumn, however, the looms were taken out to make room for a long, low table which was well smeared with bezum, and the round, three-legged stools were brought up from the servants’ room. That meant that Soldier Svens, the parish shoemaker, was expected. Soon he and his apprentices came shouldering great knapsacks packed full of awls, hammers, bundles of lasts, wax-ends, eyelets, heel-irons and shoe-pegs, all of which were dumped upon the table.
The cobbler was a tall, gaunt man with a shock of black hair and a full black beard. Seeing him for the first time one thought him a fierce and dangerous fellow, more fit for fighting than for the shoemaker’s bench. But when he spoke, it was in a soft, timorous voice. His eyes were rather small and mild-looking, and his whole bearing was a bit uncertain. He was perhaps not so very dangerous after all.
Lieutenant Lagerlöf’s little children were in high glee when the shoemaker arrived. They bounded up the difficult stairs to the loom-room many times a day. It was not so much for chatter they came—for Soldier Svens was a reticent and diligent man—as to watch the work, to see how a shoe was made, from the stretching of the leather on the last to the cutting out of the bootlaces.
The shoemaker, who usually sat with drooping head, brightened when he heard Lieutenant Lagerlöf’s footstep on the stairs. He and the Lieutenant were old regiment comrades. After they had discussed brogans, sole-leather, and boot-grease a while, they fell to reminiscing about Trossnäs Field, and when they were well warmed up to it, the Lieutenant would coax the shoemaker to sing an old war song which was unlike any other battle hymn in that it began thus: We heroes from Sweden, we do not love to fight. That song the soldiers had made up when they marched down to Denmark in the year 1848 on the expedition known as the “Sandwich War.”
Singularly enough, Shoemaker Svens loved to talk about Tailor Lager, who had sat many a time in that very room in the days of the Paymaster of the Regiment, and who was as merry and full of fun as he was grave and mournful.
“You have probably heard, Lieutenant, how the tailor came to be called Lager,” the shoemaker began.
The Lieutenant knew the story as well as he knew his “Our Father,” but all the same he replied: